Linux.Conf.Au (LCA) 2008 has announced its first keynote presenter – Bruce Schneier!
Category Archives: Linux
ZFS/FUSE makes it to LinuxWorld and LWN
An email interview with myself following on from my ZFS/FUSE blogs has formed part of an article about ZFS/FUSE on LinuxWorld, which has also been noted on LWN.
LCA 2008 Call For Presentations
linux.conf.au 2008 Call For Presentations
linux.conf.au isn’t just a Linux conference. It is a technical conference about Free Software, held annually in Australasia. We invite submissions on any Free Software related subject; from Linux and the BSDs to OpenOffice.org, from networking to audio-visual magic, from deep hacks to Creative Commons.
** Please feel free to forward this email to any group **
** or individual who you feel might be interested. **
Important dates
- Submissions open: Friday, June 1 2007
- Submission deadline: Friday, July 20, 2007
- Email notifications from review committee: early September
- Conference begins: Monday, January 28 2008
Presentations being accepted
You can submit a 50 minute talk proposal, or a 2 or 4 hour tutorial proposal: tutorials are interactive and involve more audience participation. All presentations must be related to Free and Open Source Software.
How to submit
Please see http://linux.conf.au/presentations for more information on the types of presentations we’re looking for and full details of how to submit a proposal. You can even submit a video pitch!
About linux.conf.au
linux.conf.au (http://linux.conf.au/) is Australia’s annual technical conference about Free Software. Fun, informal and seriously technical, linux.conf.au draws together Free and Open Source Software developers from across the world. It will be held from January 28th to February 2nd, 2008 at The University of Melbourne.
About Linux Australia
Linux Australia (http://www.linux.org.au/) is the peak body for Linux User Groups (LUGs) around Australia, and as such represents approximately 5000 Australian Linux users and developers. Linux Australia facilitates the organisation of this international Free Software conference in a different Australasian city each year.
LCA 2008 – Call For Papers now open
Linux.Conf.Au 2008, which will be held right here in Melbourne, has just (( I started writing this around 11am, now I get to post it about 9 hours later.. )) opened up its Call For Papers, some come on in!
The closing date of the CFP will be 20th July 2007.
They are also accepting proposals for mini-confs too.
The mini-conferences are dedicated conference streams for specific communities of interest. The linux.conf.au organisers provide the space, and leave the rest up to the organiser of each mini-conf. Mini-conf speakers and delegates need to register for the main conference to participate.
Go on, give those of us on the LCA 2008 papers committee something exciting to read!
Microsoft / Novell Deal Terms Posted
LWN has this to say:
The terms of the Microsoft/Novell deal have been posted at last. There are three parts: the patent cooperation agreement granting the patent non-licenses, the technical collaboration agreement describing the technical work each company will do, and the business collaboration agreement on the business arrangements.
Groklaw also has an initial post about the SEC filing which details the agreement and quotes Novell on how GPLv3 may affect it.
KDE 3.5.7 Released
Hoorah, KDE 3.5.7 is out, and I’ve just upgraded my home machine using the available packages for Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty).
Oddpod – Donna’s new Podcast with Caiseal Mor
Well after a few months of tinkering around my fab wife Donna has her new podcast Oddpod off the ground!
Her first guest is Caiseal Mor:
Caiseal Mor is best known as a bestselling fantasy fiction novelist. Those managing his public image have portrayed him to the public in many ways, none of them as a man with autism. Here Caiseal talks to autistic author, Donna Williams, about his decision to go public with his autism, a diagnosis he had in late childhood.
ObTech: The podcast is recorded using Cubase and then some extra tweaking done with Audacity under Linux. We’re using WordPress with the excellent PodPress plugin to deliver it from our Debian Etch Linux virtual machine (using Xen) hosted with those nice folks at Rimuhosting.
Dell to ship Ubuntu Linux
Dell have announced they will sell systems bundled with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), though the details are yet to be announced. Here’s hoping that this time they escape beyond the USA (hello Dell, there is a world outside the US!). There’s also a report on the BBC, which is where I first saw this mentioned.
On the Direct2Dell page that announces this there is a video interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical in a variety of formats, including the free Theora codec. Props to Dell for including that.
If this gets to Australia I suspect my next laptop will be ones of these Dell’s (as long as they have a model with an Intel graphics card).
A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the Playstation 3
Eugen Leitl has just posted on the Beowulf list a message with a link to a draft of a paper by Alfredo Buttari, Piotr Luszczek, Jakub Kurzak, Jack Dongarra and George Bosilca called A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the Playstation 3. It’s a 74 page PDF looking at the possibilities and problems with using the PS3 for scientific computing (there is already a PS3 Linux cluster at NCSU).
The introduction to the paper lets you know that this isn’t going to be easy..
As exciting as it may sound, using the PS3 for scientiï¬c computing is a bumpy ride. Parallel programming models for multi-core processors are in their infancy, and standardized APIs are not even on the horizon. As a result, presently, only hand-written code fully exploits the hardware capabilities of the CELL processor. Ultimately, the suitability of the PS3 platform for scientiï¬c computing is most heavily impaired by the devastating disproportion between the processing power of the processor and the crippling slowness of the interconnect, explained in detail in section 9.1. Nevertheless, the CELL processor is a revolutionary chip, delivering ground-breaking performance and now available in an affordable package. We hope that this rough guide will make the ride slightly less bumpy.
Of course, it’s unlikely you’re going to see the PS3 being used in production clusters anyway, so the interconnect shouldn’t be such a problem there.. 🙂
The paper covers the hardware, Linux support and how to get it onto a PS3, programming methods and models, MPI, performance, etc. The paper isn’t complete as I write, but it is still a very interesting read. HPC folks will certainly want to read section 9.1 “Limitations of the PS 3 for Scientiï¬c Computing”, especially the part that says:
Double precision performance. Peak performance of double precision floating point arithmetic is a factor of 14 below the peak performance of single precision. Computations which demand full precision accuracy will see a peak performance of only 14 Gflop/s, unless mixed-precision approaches can be applied.
Welcome to WordPress, Russell!
Russell Coker, SELinux developer, Bonnie++ maintainer and fellow LUV person has now switched from Blogger to his own WordPress installation, which makes leaving comments a hell of a lot easier! 🙂
He’s also now got a blog on “random things that are large or of limited interest“, though why that isn’t just a category on his main site (and using WordPress’s handy “more” marker to stop the whole thing showing up on the front page) I’m not sure.
Anyway, welcome to WordPress Russell!